STOTT on Maxwell, Hastings on Conrad Black; it has been an unusually good autumn for books about journalism that offer intriguing insights into the relationship between editors and their owners or proprietors. Now we have the third and final volume of S. J. Taylor’s history of the Daily Mail (An Unlikely Hero, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, £25). It describes how Vere Harmsworth, the third Lord Rothermere, and David English saved the Daily Mail in 1971; created The Mail on Sunday; bought and bolstered the Evening Standard from the ashes of the Beaverbrook empire; and then passed the torch to a new